New Player questions

I am fairly new to Trainz...well, not really...let me explain. I started out with TS2009 a while back which I purchased for my son since he is really into trains (what boy is not!?). Soon afterwards, I found Trainz is not really a "game" as much as it is a simulator. So it lay dormant for years in my PC until I got the itch to pick at it some more. I saw the superior textures of TS12 and grabbed it as well. After toying around for a while with the tutorials and the built in routes, I decided to try my hand at some of the add-on routes/sessions as well as surveyor creating custom sessions for the routes I already had. Some of the questions I have that I need answers for or at least some good links for reading up on are:

1) When editing an existing route and making a new session, how is one to add industries? There are just SO MANY assets under the "objects" tab in surveyor and none have descriptions of what they produce or require.

2) If I want to keep existing industries, how is one to know what type of rolling stock is needed for a particular commodity? Obviously coal and logs are easy, but what about the others? Steel, concrete, etc.

3) Somewhere out there, there must be a more in-depth guide or manual to surveyor than the few pages in the game manual because it simply is just not enough (at least not for myself).

Thanks in advance to any and all that take the time to contribute to my questions and to all a good day!!

If you look though the list of scenery assets in surveyor, there is an icon that indicates if the building is "industry active", but the only way to know what it consumes and produces in to plonk on the map somewhere, click on he question mark (bottom rigt of the asset panel), an click on the building (though some buildings are obvous by their name, as you say).

Personally, I tend to use "multi industry new", which is a piece of track (but in the scenery asset list) you can set up to consume or produce anything; buildings etc. can be added to create an appropriate scene.

what about the rolling stock? How so I know what kind of freight cars I need for a certain commodity?

hondadogie said:

what about the rolling stock? How so I know what kind of freight cars I need for a certain commodity?

Click to expand...

Well, first let me say welcome to the very addicting world of Trainz we live in. Your son has moved on to other hobbies I'm sure, but you've been bitten by the bug. It's like finding the old train set in the basement and digging out the parts!

Anyway, part of knowing which commodities are used in a freight car is in part observation of the real thing. I'm a bit more east than you in Haverhill, MA. Out here with the lovely PAR and the NS running PAS, we have commodity freights running in generic boxcars. These contain paper, goods, cardboard, construction materials, and other hidden stuff.

There are tankcars with chemicals, clay slurry for paper making, corn oil, and corn syrup.

Open gondolas contain gravel, metal bars, wooden poles, scrap, and coal hoppers contain coal. (obvious).

There are also covered hoppers containing cement, plastic pellets, corn, wheat, granulated sugar,

Now moving this to the hobby (not a computer game!), look for similar freight cars. There are different content creators that have made industry-interactive freight cars. Most of the cars have the Ind-icon or green check mark in the corner of the window.

Perhaps and easier way to find these cars is to visit the Content Manager. In CM, you can view the descriptions of the various cars, and even add them to your favorites list. This can also be done through Rail yard, which I've completely forgotten about because I hardly use that.

Now within Surveyor, when you're setting up your trains, you'll see your favorite freight cars all picked out for you and ready to place on the tracks.

Hopefully this helps. There is more to this, and I'm sure others can chime in here as well.

John

You can place a wagon on the track and click on it to open the details panel. Some wagons can,t carry a commodity and a blue panel will open. If the wagon can carry commodities when the panel opens the top line will say "load 0", the next line "load 1" and so on. Each line will display the icon (s) of the commodities it can carry. This can be as few as one to any number. You can also add a commodity to a wagon that you want it to carry. Commodities can also be deleted. At the top of each line to the right of "load" is the number of items of the commodity the the wagon will convey. So a commodity such as coal or petrol will always be 1. If you examine the 50ft up flatcar for instance and look down the loads list you ill see that it can carry 3 x railway ties, new. Another useful thing you can do is play around with a wagon to see what it looks like with a particular load. Lets say you want a the 50 ft flatcar to carry I Beams. Find the 2 items load and click on it to open the commodities list. Select I Beams and it will open a small panel. click on the load 0 and change it to load 2 and the wagon will be instantly loaded with 2 stacks of i Beams. When in Driver you can of course change the default load to I Beams to make certain the wagon will load I Beams rather thhan another commodity